All Chapters of THE LUNA HE THREW AWAY: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

The correction's next phase, named, scoped, and timed.I looked at Fen. He was reading the same calculation I was reading. Seven years was achievable if the forty-one people on Cass's list were all found and positioned correctly. Seven years was achievable if the eastern Alphas Rowan had been cultivating continued to engage and the formal correspondence became formal partnership. Seven years was achievable if the archive's documentation kept pace and the Q4 session established the institutional framework for what came next.Seven years was achievable if we did the work."Can you build the architecture," I said to Lena."I've been building it for three years without knowing that's what I was doing," she said. "I know what the forty-three locations are. The document shows me how they connect to each other and to the existing network." She paused. "I need the full archive access. The pre-covenant documents and the territorial records and the boundary documentation." She paused. "And I ne

Sera was at the Q4 session. She had come from the Council Hall, where she had been living since February, the decision made quietly and practically: she was ninety-seven and the walking distance between the Council Hall and the archive was shorter than the walking distance between anywhere else and everything she needed to do. She had a room in the Hall's residential section, which had been arranged by Kael's administrative office with the specific efficiency of someone ensuring that the space was dignified rather than functional.She had watched the Q4 session from the observers' section with the quality of attention that had not changed in the months since December, the precision still present, the body carrying its accounting more visibly now, the two existing simultaneously.After the session, when most of the delegations had left, she sat with me in the emptied Hall.The space in the afternoon light. The wolf in thorns above the dais."Your father would have been at this session,

Kael was still there. He had not moved from the chair across the desk. He had read nothing, done nothing, been present."Thank you," I said."Yes," he said.I put the notebook away. The accounting was not finished, it would not be finished today or next Tuesday or in three years, but the weight had distributed. Not gone. Distributed. Held differently.I picked up the pen.The annotation project. Page three hundred and forty-two. The section on the archive's role in the Greater Network's documentation infrastructure, the protocol for training the eastern territories' archive contributors, the specific methodology for integrating new regional data into the central system.The work. The next necessary thing.I wrote.Kael stayed in the chair and read the governance document he'd brought with him, the one about the eastern territory governance frameworks that the Q4 session had opened up as a policy question, and we worked in the comfortable parallel of two people who had been in the same

The archive, around me. The sixty years of Oren's work. The fourteen months of the new documentation project. Cass's notation on the wall. The cross-reference Oren had finished on his last morning. The cases of Fen's field photographs, properly catalogued.And on the shelf Sera had been using, her fourteen years of supplementary documentation. The careful record she had kept in exile, tracking the entity and the bloodlines and the conditions that were coming, adding to the archive piece by piece until the conditions arrived and the archive could absorb what she had been building.The archive was the most complete account of the correction that existed. It held every person who had contributed, named and unnamed. Oren's cross-referencing had found the unnamed ones, the Petra's fathers and the land's keepers and the grandmothers who had died at wells and barn corners. They were in there too. Their contributions documented even if they had not known they were contributing.The archive re

Six years after the night in Moonstone Hall, the Greater Network's first five territories were operational.Not complete, operational. There is a difference, and anyone who had been doing this work long enough had learned to hold the distinction rather than collapse it. Operational meant the nodes were established, the interface layer was running, the Watcher function had coverage, and the people with relevant capacities were named and active and connected to the archive. Complete would have implied a state the network was not designed to reach. It was a living system. Living systems don't complete. They develop.Dael's territory had been first. Her land's keeper, who was now ninety and moving carefully and had been running the listening place maintenance for fifty-eight years, had stood at the territory's primary node on the morning of the formal integration ceremony and pressed her palm to the stone and felt the three-line network's frequency arrive and join with what had already be